Nashville Eliminates Detroit: "Honkeytown Has Taken Down Hockeytown"

“Honkeytown has taken down Hockeytown,” was Dave Strader’s call as time expired in the Detroit – Nashville series. If you look at this series based on just this season, this wasn’t an upset. Nashville had more points than Detroit this season and came in as the higher seed. But if you look at this historically, this is as big an upset as you can imagine. Detroit is one of the original 6 franchises. The Predators franchise is barely a teenager.

Alexander Radulov put the Predators up in the first with his lone goal of the series.

David Legwand scored the game and series-winner early in the third period. The Predators advance to their second consecutive Western Conference semi-final. This guy was pretty excited about it. You might have missed him in the original picture of Legwand celebrating.

Stephen Douglas

Born and raised in Mid-Southern Upstate New York, Stephen holds a master's degree in public communications. Money well spent? I'd say so. These days he jokes about sports on the Internet. Professionally.

Preds were the better team. A team built to beat the Wings. Changes are coming to Detroit.

Sleeper66

Changes are coming to Detroit.

A shit-ton of cap space should equate to a top-six forward and top-four D-man, at the very least.

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We had Pete Weber’s TV call here in Nashville (and he is a fantastic play-by-play guy so I was happy to have it) though that meant I didn’t get to hear the NBC Sports version of the final play until now. The series win is a VERY big deal for Nashville particularly because it was Detroit who they beat.

The influx of Red Wings fans in the early 1990s to the greater Nashville area to work the Saturn plant south of the city helped in part to make adding an NHL expansion franchise here a viable option. Also, Detroit had won two playoff meetings over Nashville within the past ten years, so there was some level of vindication for Preds fans.

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Also, the “Hockey Tonk” tagline used in some Preds promotional material is a play off of Honky Tonk, but Strader got it backward and called Nashville “Honky Town” which has connotations I don’t think were intended.